Chant to the Blue Moon

 Can't you just hear the lapping sound of the waves chanting to the blue moon?

I created this image in iPad iDraw, a great portable vector program, and tweeked the textures, lighting and cropping in Photoshop.  

Nuzzling Up Against Life

I have always been interested in the nuances that distinguish sexuality from sensuality and recently ran into a lovely description written by MargauxMeade at her blog, Love in the Time of Addiction:

"My sexuality used to be such a big part of who I was. I could feel it pulsating beneath my skin and surrounding me like a force field. It undulated when I moved and clung to my clothes like perfume.....I'd say it was less sexuality than sensuality--a desire to nuzzle up against life."

This is a highly effective description of sensuality that embraces the spirit of loving life, being engaged, making meaning, savouring experiences, being enchanted by concepts, colors, shapes, scents, texture. Sensuality surfaces or fails to surface in every little thing a person does or with which he surrounds himself and fills his heart and mind.  Sensuality exhibits passion about everything, not just love objects.   

Sex is fairly mechanical or manipulative unless infused with honest sensuality.  This is why blantantly sexual public expressions are crude and unattractive to me.  But the alchemy of sex and sensuality produces a force that shimmers.

Perfumes of the Spirit

Dr. Paolo Rovesti of Milan University in Italy was an interesting man who was something of a pioneer in the study of the effect of essential oils on the mind.  In Medical Aromatherapy Kurt Schnaubelt described Dr. Rovesti  as a man "traveling around the globe, he researched the role of fragrance in past cultures, such as the many ways fragrance was integrated
into spiritual, magical, and social rituals." 

Dr. Rovesti lamented modern man's loss of olfactory sensibilities through sterile living.  He found tribes in India who had the olfactory capacity of animals who could detect visitors by their smell over 100 yards away.  In Essence and Alchemy, Mandy Aftel quotes Dr. Rovesti from In Search of Perfumes Lost, "We who are immersed in the unnaturalness of modern-day life cannot recall, without nostalgia and sadness, those gifts of nature at man's disposal, now neglected or in disuse.  Among those are paradises of natural perfumes, of the perfumes of the past and of the spirit." 

A particularly charming olfactive story told by Dr. Rovesti was that of a colleague who kept a sample of the perfume of each of the great loves of his life - eight by the end of his life - labeled by name, years of love and places to which the scent and women were associated.  According to Dr. Rovesti "he told me with half-closed eyes, 'I relive in a film of memories the delicious romances of my life, when the whole world rotated around one woman, her name and her face, under the spell of her perfume, which now erases time and brings back in all its beauty what by now, as far as reality is concerned, has turned to ashes.'" 

I have heard that the fragrance Jicky was created by Aime Guerlain to honor a lost, unrequited love for a girl he met while studying in England.  The story is lovely, and the fragrance may be as well, but Dr. Rovesti's scent collecting colleague likely would find such an experiment futile despite its creativity.  Memory is what it is and cannot be created anew.  To déjà vu the ghost of lost love some unextractable molecule of the past must be brought forward embedded in the heart and brain.  Such is the nature of smell.  Such is the nature of love.

The Lost Art of The Coffee Table

The reason we call the coffee table by that name is because it used to be used to serve coffee.  I resurrected this lovely custom recently and had a charming cup of coffee.   I wonder why coffee tastes better in a thin porcelain art deco cup than in a mug.  It isn't my imagination; I suppose all things taste better when graciousness is part of the mix.

Graciousness does not have ulterior motives.  It is a quality of kindness, courtesy, tact, delicacy, charm, good taste and generosity of spirit.   Respect is implied when we offer graciousness, whether that respect is returned or not.  To live graciously is to treat everyday events as worthy expressions of art.  Even a cup of coffee.  It means treating others as worthy of respect, whether they are or not. 

Aphrodite Energy

"It is important to establish a clear delineation between sensuality and sexuality. Sensual energy is what we often refer to as "Aphrodite energy." This kind of energy exists in both men and women, though in our experience women have a more natural connection to it. It is a very important kind of energy because it is empowering, it creates an intense experience of being alive, and it can provide a strong kind of connecting energy between two partners. It is quite surprising to learn how easy it is to be sexual and lack sensuality. When this sensuality is missing in relationship, you can have an active sexual connection and still feel sensually starved.......

You may yearn for it not knowing what it is that calls to you."

From Partnering: A New Kind Of Relationship by Hal Stone and Sidra Stone

Ghost Flowers

In a NY Times article, Ghost Flowers, perfume critic Chandler Burr describes the development of the 1984 fragrance Antonia's Flowers by perfumer Bernard Chant at the request of New York florist Antonia Bellanca.  It seems that Antonia was mesmerized by freesia's allure and heralded the flower's scent above all others because it "knocked your socks off, like trumpets in an orchestra; everyone else sings backup, even the lilies."  To outshine a lily in fragrance?  Now that is some feat.   

Chant did develop the freesia inspired perfume, and Burr indicates that it became something of a  cult favorite with "its intensely green top note and its stratospheric quality, like jasmine at 48,000 feet, swimming in pure ozone."   But, as Paul Harvey might say, here's the rest of the story: the perfume contains no freesia at all, and Burr claims that there is no perfume in existence that contains freesia.

We might be disillusioned further with Burr's claim that numerous perfumes we love, often because they smell of our favorite flowers, contain not a trace of the actual flower.  Some flowers just have no scent, and distillation techniques have not been able to extract some scents, and in others, what is captured is negligible.  For instance, the violet will not give up its smell.  Neither will a host of others to include mimosa, lavender, jonquil, narcissus, geranium, hyacinth, lilac, lily, honeysuckle, peony, camellia, wisteria or lily of the valley.   

This concept fascinates me.  It makes me stop to ponder.  I suppose it would be hard to sell the quintessential lily of the valley perfume Diorissimo as the quintessential hydroxycitronellal, geraniol and phenyl ethyl alcohol perfume.  Still, it disturbs and prevokes vague feeling of betrayal to know that the allure of Diorissimo is an unholy ghost of sorts.  Our senses can be fooled, and we can appreciate with wild abandon some experience for qualities that do not exist therein.  What is this olfactory forgery like?  Phantom pain, mystery meat, a sensual metaphor, a pig in pearls, an artistic forgery?  Surely a sensual trickery requiring truth and beauty to part ways in order to keep the illusion alive.  

Whatever the case, I cannot live without my lavender-like scent, so I will continue to believe in ghosts.    

The Scent of Identity

                              

Riding down the road today in the sunshine I was suddenly amazed at how good I felt despite major obstacles in my life.  Was it the sun and blue sky following a day of stormy clouds and half an inch of March snow?  Was it the hope of spring following a very long, bleak winter?  Was it the thought of my blue and white blooming hyacinths* trapped in my livingroom and kitchen, forced to bring the smell of spring to my rooms, waiting for me there?  Or......and this I prefer.....was it the perfume I tried on at Dillard's floating from my wrist, creating an atmosphere of elegant black dresses, gold jewelry and a handsome partner walking beside me through a twilight summer garden toward the lights and the music?  I don't know, but it was probably a combination of all these factors, including the perfume, that made me feel free and oddly lovely.   

I do love perfume, discretely applied.  One should have to search a little to find it, and it should be a search at close range.  It should never announce one's presence; rather a person should notice it when leaning over or brushing up against the one wearing perfume.  A hint of pleasure, rather than a shower of indulgence. 

I once had a friend kidnap my perfume, a scent not well known but packed with oak moss.  It faintly irritated me because this perfume was my mother's discovery passed down to me, a perfume my friend would have never found without my revealing the name.  Not a commonly worn or popular perfume, this scent was part of my identity at the time, and my friend just up and bought it, sprayed it all over herself and assumed it as hers even in my presence.  Alas, I moved on to other fragrances but continue to wear that particular perfume from time to time even now.  The perfume outlasted the friendship, as is often the case. 

Scent has a profound effect on emotions, and we have scent identities.  That which lures us comes from where we have been and where we want to go; flowers, barks, water and earth we have smelled; foods cooked by our mamas; the smell of linens upon which we slept as children; plants that inhabit our homes and gardens; good experiences and bad in the presence of backdrop smells.  Antiseptic smells in hospitals evoke in me the terror of a four year old losing her daddy, and carnations cloud me with sadness taking me back to granny's death.  Lavender transports me to a happy home I once had, and coffee and nutbread baking takes me to the home I love today.  

And my perfume takes me to places of fantacy I have known and am yet to know.  I think I will buy the perfume I tested today because it wore well and remains on my wrist hours after being applied.  I won't tell you what it is, however, because I discovered it, it is mine and I don't graciously share my perfume or identity.

* Legend says that Mohammad said that if he only had two loaves of bread he would sell one to by hyacinths because hyacinths would feed his soul.